Rating: 4 Stars

Publisher: E.L. Ough, A.E. Jensen

Genre: Gay Romance

Tags: Contemporary, Age Gap (11 Years), Christmas, Disability, Insta-Love (3 or 4 Days), Romance, Virgin

Length: 170 Pages

Reviewer: Cindi

Purchase At: Amazon

Blurb –

You never know when you’re going to meet Mr. Right. It could be on your worst day, thirty-five thousand feet in the air.

Heaven

With Christmas just around the corner, now might not be the best time to strike out on my own, but when my job offers me a paid internship in the US, how can I say no? Orphaned since the age of sixteen, being part of a family is all I dream of. To once again feel safe and cherished and for someone to understand my disability.

Does such a man even exist? And if so, am I too old at nineteen to believe in Christmas miracles?

Mason

My plans to spend Christmas in the UK fell through when I was called back home for my mother’s accident. From there, one disaster led to the next. It seemed the only thing that could turn my day around was the delightful young man seated next to me on the plane.

With a name like Heaven Leigh, he must have been sent from above.

Christmas in Heaven is a low-angst, age gap holiday meet-cute romance with grumpy/sunshine MCs, a dash of forced proximity and hurt/comfort, British banter, first times, and a fluffy golden retriever.

Review –

I picked this book up with the intention of reading it and then doing a quickie review on Goodreads. After finishing it, I decided to go ahead and do a full blog review.

Heaven, 19, named that because he was a miracle baby for his late parents, has dysgraphia. He can read and comprehend fine. He just can’t write well due to his disability. He became an orphan when his parents were killed when he was 16. When he aged out of the foster system at 18, he was lucky enough to be taken in by Helping Hands, an organization that helps people who are alone and have disabilities. The organization has been a major lifesaver for Heaven. They’ve given him a place to stay, helped him learn skills and a little money, and have become part of his chosen family. His boss and friend at the center has just told him that he’s been accepted for a paid internship with a company who helps those with disabilities. The problem? He’s never left the UK and the position is in the United States.

Mason, 30, is having a bad day. He’s just flown to the UK for the holidays with friends. First, the airlines lost his luggage. Second, the gets a call from his mom’s neighber in America telling him that she’s broken her ankle. Mason, of course, has to get back on a plane and head home to be her caretaker. Third, when he rushes to meet the Uber driver for his drive back to the airport, he bumps into a woman not paying attention and gets covered by icky coffee drinks. With no time to find another shirt, he’s forced to wear an ugly sweater given to him by his friend before he left. Part of Mason’s holiday plans in the UK involved an ugly sweater party at the friend’s house. Knowing he wouldn’t buy one of his own, the friend’s wife sent one to him. The sweater was funny by crude.

When he arrives late at the airport, his first class seats have been given to a newly married couple so he’s forced to sit with *gasp!* the little people. 😉 His seat mate is Heaven, who is terrified of flying. They start talking during the flight, with each man liking/wanting/lusting after the other. Let’s just say it doesn’t take long before grumpy Mason is thinking naughty thoughts about ‘pretty boy’ Heaven.

Heaven’s a virgin, but that doesn’t stop him from wanting to climb Mason like a tree. *snort*

He does find out toward the end of the flight that Mason will coincidentally be his new boss during his internship. After an incident with Heaven’s accommodations after they land, Mason offers to let him stay with him at his mother’s house until the incident has been cleared up.

You see where this is going.

I love Mason’s mother and her boyfriend slash next door neighbor. His mom was great. She saw something between Heaven and Mason right off.

Everything happens at warp speed from here on out. Mason and Heaven go from being strangers, to having a lot of sex, to planning a life together, and using the L word in literally like 3 days, I think? I don’t mind insta-love if it’s written well. It was here for the most part, but I think it would’ve been a little more believable had Heaven had any kind of experience before. In a sense, and I’m not knocking the story, it came across as him latching on to the one person who gave him attention because he was starving for love.

Even so, they worked together. I liked Mason okay. He knew what, who, he wanted, and he wasn’t going to stop until he had it. As for Heaven, he was a total sweetheart for the most part.

This book has zero drama or angst, which is fine for me because I don’t have time to get involved in an emotional book right now. One of my favorite books of the year, Until I Saw You, was mentioned, so another plus. I did see later that the author of that book was a big help with Christmas In Heaven. It also reminded me that I’ve not read the book after Until I Saw You. I’ll get to it for sure after the first of the year.

Other than Heaven being a little naive, I think I only had one niggle with the story, which is why it’s rated 4 stars and not more.

The American vs. UK spelling and lingo.

Kazza, my best friend and blog partner, is Australian and I’m American, so I’m very familiar with the different spellings and lingo. I was perfectly fine with it throughout the book – during HEAVEN’S point of view, not Mason’s. I don’t know one American who would call a sweater a jumper. While the UK spellings were fine for me when the sections were being told in Mason’s POV, the actual words he used weren’t. It wasn’t constant, but there were quite a few words and phrases that he wouldn’t have used in every day conversations. He didn’t live in the UK. He was merely visiting. Had he spent a considerable amount of time there and got used to the way things are described, it wouldn’t matter to me. But because he was American, it did.

I know it’s a minor detail, but it was enough to bug me.

Otherwise, this is super sweet and well-written. The sex scenes – while a little too frequent at times for me – were written extremely well, as was the story as a whole. Unless I’m mistaken, I believe this is a debut novel. If so, the author (s) should be very proud because this is a very entertaining read.